Revolutionising legal processes with new technologies

Background

LegalZoom is a pioneering online legal company comprised of legal attorneys that provides an array of online legal documents like wills and living trusts, LegalZoom offers LLC, incorporation, trademark and registered agent services.

LegalZoom's goal is to take the complexity and cost out of many legal proceedings for their clients by enabling them to produce contracts, statements and other legal materials online via automated processes.

One legal procedure that they wanted to streamline for their clients was the acquisition of depositions from parties or witnesses involved in
criminal or civil cases. Conventionally, evidence of this nature is acquired via face-to-face meetings usually at the premises of the law firm concerned between attorneys and witnesses or parties involved.

LegalZoom felt that there had to be a better way, whereby witnesses and other parties could interface with attorneys online, providing key
evidence required from their own homes, prior to a trial.

This is a brand new concept that would require high levels of technical skill to implement not least to satisfy the legal requirements of evidence gathering with a secure method that protects against tampering.

All of Dotfives efforts and expertise culminated in the development and success of this ground-breaking concept.

Results

Group calls would be conducted securely via browser software that would enable video and audio interfacing between attorneys, witnesses and other key parties, while the whole stream was recorded via a central server. Recording the meetings to the server in real-time mitigates issues with recording and sending of files post-interview and limits evidence tampering.

Dotfive developers created a module
using the Chromium WebRTC library, and developed a browser client and a signalling server using an ICE
framework to regulate data flow and coordinate communication between the
browsers and servers.

The complex data-exchanging processes developed are a stark contrast to the user experience, which was simple, intuitive and stable.

Proving this concept opened up new opportunities for the ways in which attorneys could interface with participants in cases to obtain evidence and information, revolutionising these processes in a cost-effective and user-intuitive manner.